The following excerpt is taken fromBlack Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China's Democracy
Movement,
by George Black and Robin Munro (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., 1993), pp. 234 - 246.

The phrase "Tiananmen Square massacre" is now fixed firmly in
the political vocabulary of the late twentieth century. Yet it is
inaccurate. There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square on the night
of June 3. But on the western approach roads, along Chang'an
Boulevard and Fuxingmen Avenue, there was a bloodbath that claimed
hundreds of lives when the People's Liberation Army found its path
blocked by a popular uprising that was being fueled by despair and
rage. To insist on this distinction is not splitting hairs. What
took place was the slaughter not of students but of ordinary
workers and residents - precisely the target that the Chinese
government had intended.

"Tiananmen Square massacre" is the shorthand that observers in the
West distilled from the hours of dramatic television footage and
thousands of column inches of press reporting. Although hundreds of
journalists were in Beijing that night, few were present for the
army's climactic clearing of the square itself in the predawn hours
of June 4. Many of the press were on the real killing grounds of
western Beijing, several miles away, and they reported vividly and
accurately on what they saw. Some who tried to remain in the square
were arrested and did not see the final PLA assault. Others were
pinned down behind roadblocks. Still others were working in their
hotels to meet early-morning filing deadlines for media in distant
time zones. But most of the reporters who remained near the square
after one o'clock in the morning, when the first army units got
there, left in haste and out of legitimate fear for their
safety.

The lack of eyewitnesses was the first problem in establishing
what happened on that fearsome night in Beijing. But there were
other, more profound questions about how the foreign media saw
their role in the Beijing spring. (1) The pacifist idealism of the
young students triggered memories of the 1960s and America's civil
rights movement, and the students' adept use of Western symbols,
like headbands inscribed with Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or
give me death," riveted Western attention on the students, which
caused the crucial role of the workers and the laobaixing to be
largely overlooked.

There was more: some predisposition, perhaps, to believe in the
massacre in the square, even though no one actually saw it. Whether
or not it happened in reality, it was the necessary consummation of
an allegory of innocence, sacrifice, and redemption. To this, the
rhetoric of the students themselves contributed mightily. On the
first day of the hunger strike, they declared, "Our bodies are
still tender and not full grown, and the prospect of dying
frightens us all; but history calls and we must go." Chai Ling,
such a magnetic presence for the foreign news cameras, spoke of
sacrifice in almost mystical terms. On May 28, with the students in
disarray over the issue of withdrawing from the square, she said
that "it would take a massacre, which would spill blood like a
river through Tiananmen Square, to awaken the people." One Western
sinologist recalled a student telling him in the final hours: "We
are now ready to face death, and we don't want you to have to be
part of that. Please go home."' And the media, for the most part,
did so.

Imagination filled the gaps. Into the vacuum rushed the most lurid
tales of the supposed denouement in the square. Wu'er Kaixi,
flamboyant to the last, reported that he had seen "about two
hundred students" cut down by gunfire in the army's predawn
assault, but it was revealed later that he had been spirited away
to safety in a van several hours earlier. A widely recounted
eyewitness report, purportedly from a student at Qinghua
University, spoke of the students on the Monument being mowed down
at point-blank range by a bank of machine guns at four in the
morning. The survivors had then either been chased across the
square by tanks and crushed, or clubbed to death by infantrymen.
But it was all pure fabrication.

By the time historians began to correct the record, the episode
was enshrined in myth: Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students had
died in a massacre in Tiananmen Square. As Tom Hayden would write
in the Los Angeles Times, it was the equivalent of the slaughter of
the entire graduating class at the United States' top
universities.

No one had been listening to what Peng Zhen said: The students
were not the problem. Indeed, the Party's line never varied after
Deng Xiaoping first defined it for the April 26 People's Daily
editorial. "Emotionally excited young students" were never the
issue. The official conspiracy theory demanded other threats and
other scapegoats - "outside elements" with "ulterior motives." This
meant dissident intellectuals and workers. After their ruthless
repression under Mao, the intelligentsia had been granted a kind of
historic compromise by Deng. But by the spring of 1989, they had
come to be seen as the agents of bourgeois liberalization, of
China's "peaceful evolution" toward Western-style pluralism. After
Tiananmen, they would be singled out for punishment. The working
class, meanwhile, had become the carrier of an even more dangerous
virus - the Polish disease.

The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation, tiny though it may have
been, was the "cancer cell" the authorities feared. The Goddess of
Democracy represented the arrogant intrusion of decadent Western
values into the symbolic heart of Chinese Communism, rupturing the
sacred cosmology, the feng shui of the great square. But the crude
red and black banner of the BWAF, less than a hundred yards away,
signified the more terrifying power of the workers awakened.

The students initiated the Tiananmen movement, and they
brilliantly outmaneuvered and embarrassed a leaden-footed
government. But after the mass demonstrations of mid-May, the
threat from the students was dwarfed by the intervention of much
broader social forces. This threat was like a pyramid. At the base
were the laobaixing, with their outpouring of spontaneous human
sympa-thy, a million or more ordinary people, like Lü Jinghua
with her cold drinks and her pork dumplings. The second level was
the ideological defection of the Party apparatus itself. By
mid-May, much of the Chinese press had rallied to the cause of
democracy; even sections of the Public Security service, the law
courts, and the military - the very backbone of the People's
Democratic Dictatorship - had begun to break free of the Party's
iron grip.

Faced with the crumbling of its power, the Party imposed martial
law on May 20. But again it miscalculated. Its inner defections had
progressed further than anyone realized; it did not even have
control over its own secrets, and it failed to anticipate that its
tanks would be halted by a human wall of protesters. Age, and years
of unchallenged authority, had atrophied the Party's judgment,
leaving it incapable of foreseeing the action groups that now
formed spontaneously throughout Beijing. After May 20, the pickets,
the Dare-to-Die squads, and the Flying Tigers virtually took over
the day-to-day running of the city. The PSB and the traffic police
disappeared from view. (3) And, finally, there was the apex of the
pyr-amid: the specter of an incipient organization of all classes,
symbolized by the Capital Joint Liaison Group.

The students, in the final analysis, were marginal to the threat.
But ironically, one of their main arguments for prolonging the
occupation of Tiananmen was that they had nothing to lose: Since
they were the heroes and focal point of the movement, the
incarnation of all the government hated, it therefore followed that
they would suffer the fiercest repercussions. Chai Ling had been
shaken by a conversation with a plainclothes police officer in the
early days of the movement. She had asked him what the maximum
sentence was for counterrevolution. Seventeen years, the man
answered. (4) Chai Ling gasped. Seventeen years? She would be forty
by the time she got out.

But the government saw the matter quite differently: To deal with
the students, it was enough to drive them from the square and herd
them back to their campuses. Mass self-criticisms would follow, and
probably bad job placements. In the case of the more obstinate
ringleaders, those who refused to repent, short jail sen-tences
might be necessary. But the larger threat could be eradicated only
by the application of brute force, terror, and exemplary
punishment. The specter of organized popular unrest had to be
exorcised not for a year or two, but for an entire
generation.

. . . The northern end of the square was now almost deserted. (7)
Another APC, its tracks jammed with iron bars, blazed in the
northeast corner, near the Goddess of Democracy. Three of its crew
had been beaten to death; the fourth was escorted to safety by
student pickets. Several dead bodies lay under the portrait of Mao
on Tiananmen Gate.

The students' tent city appeared abandoned. The southern part of
the square, below the Mao Mausoleum, was littered with burning cars
and buses but empty of people. In the north end, almost the only
sign of life was the emergency tent of the Beijing United Medical
College. Surrounded by a thin circle of student pickets, doctors
worked feverishly to save a steady stream of casualties. By then,
almost all the students had withdrawn to the three tiers of the
Monument: between three thousand and five thousand of them,
perhaps, huddled tightly together. They seemed calm, almost
resigned. Some quietly wrote their wills. There was no sense of
panic, though the steady chatter of gunfire could be heard on the
fringes of the square and in the darkness beyond. Abruptly, the
remaining loudspeakers burst to life with an endlessly repeated
warning: A "serious counterrevolutionary rebellion" had broken out;
everyone was to leave the square immediately.

The main invasion force, entering the city from the west, arrived
at the smoldering ruins of the BWAF tents at 2:00 A.M. The first
column of troop transport trucks entered the square hesitantly,
moving forward at walking pace. Groups of infantry escorted them,
at first just a thin line, but soon increasing to a dense column,
thousands of troops, all wearing steel helmets and carrying assault
rifles. They took about an hour to deploy fully along the northern
edge of the square. Several hundred troops moved across from
Tiananmen Gate to seal the northeast entrance to the square. A
student named Ke Feng, one of the main organizers of the Goddess of
Democracy project, was hiding in the small park outside the Museum
of Chinese History. In the first five minutes or so, he saw about
twenty people in the vicinity of the pedestrian underpass hit by
stray bullets, including "five people who fell and couldn't get up
again." The soldiers, Ke Feng recalled, were "jumping for joy, as
if playing a game." The PLA sealed off the entire square by 3:00
A.M. Thousands of silent troops, each carrying an AK-47 and a long
wooden cudgel, positioned themselves along the steps in front of
the museum. On the other side of the square, in front of the Great
Hall of the People, it was the same. Only a small exit corridor in
the southeast would be left open.

At the stroke of 4:00 A.M., all lights went out . . . . But still
the attack on Tiananmen Square did not materialize. For a quarter
of an hour after 4:00 A.M. there was nothing but darkness and
silence. The students remained seated on the Monument, as before.
No one made any move to leave. Noiselessly, as if in a dream, a
busload of student reinforcements appeared from the southeast. The
loudspeakers on the Monument crackled back on and a voice announced
- deadpan, as if reading a railroad schedule - "We will now play
the Internationale, to raise our fighting spirit." The famous
words, "Arise, ye starvelings of the earth," floated across the
square to the soldiers, who had been taught to sing them by the
Party.

At about 4:15 A.M., an array of lights suddenly came on all across
the front of the Great Hall of the People, filling the west side of
the square with a soft, luminous glow. At the same time,
floodlights went on along the facade of the Forbidden City. Next,
the southernmost doors of the Great Hall swung open, releasing a
river of gun-toting troops, many of them with fixed bayonets. These
soldiers formed an L-shaped blocking line across to the front of
the Mao Mausoleum. Troops fired warning shots at the Monument from
the steps of the Museum of Chinese History, and sparks flew from
the obelisk, high above the students' heads.

Just after 4:30 A.M., the loudspeakers came on again, and someone
who introduced himself as a leader of the Beijing Students
Autonomous Federation took the microphone. "Students! We must on no
account quit the square. We will now pay the highest price possible
for the sake of securing democracy in China. Our blood shall be the
consecration." There was a tense pause, and another voice, less
educated, rang out. It was an anonymous leader of the BWAF. "We
must all leave here immediately," he cried, "for a terrible
bloodbath is about to take place. There are troops surrounding us
on all sides and the situation is now extraordinarily dangerous. To
wish to die here is no more than an immature fantasy." The struggle
between immolation and compromise - or, as some of the students
would have it, between principle and surrender - continued to the
last.

On the government side, every vestige of reason seemed to
disappear. But in the end reason triumphed, after a fashion, among
the protesters who held on in the square. For that, the four
members of the seventy-two-hour hunger strike could take the
greatest credit. In the final predawn hours, they went among the
crowd at the Monument, persuading some demonstrators to surrender
their sticks, chains, and bottles, arguing with them that
resistance was futile. To their horror, they discovered one
fifteen-year-old at the foot of the Monument with a machine gun,
hidden in padded quilts, trained on the advancing army. The boy was
incoherent with grief. Someone said they had killed his brother.
The gun was wrested away from him, and Liu Xiaobo, the professor
who had recently returned from New York, took it and smashed it to
pieces.

The hunger strikers then confronted the ragged remnants of the
student leadership - Chai Ling, Feng Congde, and Li Lu. They told
them that there was no choice but to negotiate with the army. The
rock singer Hou Dejian and the economist Zhou Duo, an unlikely
pair, walked across the darkened expanse of the square to seek out
the officers in command. (8) Chai Ling declined the invitation to
go with them. She was commander in chief, she told them; she could
not abandon her people.

Two men came forward to meet Hou and Zhou. They introduced
themselves only as Commissar Ji and Commissar Gu. "There is only
one way the troops will not, by mistake, do any harm to the
students in the square while carrying out our orders," they told
the hunger strikers tersely. "The students and other people must
leave unconditionally. You have until daybreak. The southeast
corner of the square has been left open. If you could persuade the
students to leave," the officers added, "you will be
praised."

While the negotiations went on, Chai Ling and Li Lu made their
final appeals to the students. Li Lu, feeling helpless, urged
everyone to be calm. "We will stick to the principle of nonviolence
to the very end," he said, echoing what the BWAF leader had said
four or five hours earlier, what seemed like a lifetime ago. "We
won't swear when sworn at, we won't hit back when hit." But Chai
Ling's last speech was more wrapped than ever in the mystique of
blood. "There is a story", she began, "about a clan of a billion
ants who lived on a mountain. One day there was a terrible fire on
the mountain. The only way for them to escape was to hold each
other tight into a ball and roll down the mountainside. But the
ants on the outside of the ball would be burnt to death. We are now
standing on the Monument. We are the ones who stand on the outside
of our nation. Only our sacrifice can save it, only our blood can
open the eyes of our people and the rest of the world."

Zhou Duo and Hou Dejian came back. They told the students the
outcome of their talks; there was no option but to leave
immediately. They had no bargaining chips left. Too much blood had
already been shed. Hou promised that the hunger strikers would
guard the retreat and would be the last to leave. There was a
mo-mentary silence, then furious shouts of "Shame!" and
"Surrender!" From the northern sector of the square came a distant
rumble; the tanks had started their engines.

Minutes passed with nothing to break the spell until Li Lu
proposed taking a final vote. Given the darkness, a show of hands
would not work. They would have to make do with a voice vote. There
were two choices: "Evacuate!" or "Stand Firm!" Some swear to this
day that the "Stand Firm!" voices were louder; others say opinions
were equally divided. But Li Lu, opting this time for wisdom over
the clamor of the masses, announced that those who favored
evacuation had won. The occupation of Tiananmen Square would
end.

NOTES

1. The most comprehensive analysis of the performance of the
foreign media (though extremely guarded in its criticisms) is a
study of eight U.S. news organizations conducted by the Joan
Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy
at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
The center's report, entitled "Turmoil at Tiananmen: A Study of
U.S. Press Coverage of the Beijing Spring of 1989," analyzes
the television news reporting of the American Broadcasting Company
(ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and Cable News
Network (CNN); and the print coverage of the Los AngelesTimes, the New YorkTimes, the Washington
Post, the Associated Press, and Time magazine.
2. This comment was made by the scholar Ross Terrill of Harvard
University during an interview on a June 29, 1989, ABC-TV special
by Ted Koppel. Koppel, to his credit, noted that the bulk of the
killing had not taken place within the physical confines of
Tiananmen Square, but he downplayed the distinction as a "loophole"
that could be exploited by the Chinese government.
3. In one of the lesser but more startling images of the Beijing
Spring, the city's growing contingent of thieves and pickpockets
declared a temporary halt to their activities after the imposition
of martial law.
4. A technically incorrect answer, in fact. Some
counterrevolutionary offenses are punishable by longer sentences,
even by death.
. . .
7. The account that follows is drawn largely from the personal
observations and recollections of Robin Munro, who remained in
Tiananmen Square during the entire night of June 3-4, leaving with
the final departing columns of students at dawn. His memories are
supplemented in places by the freelance journalist Richard Nations.
Munro's complete account, "Who Died in Beijing, and Why," was
published in TheNation, June 11, 1990, pp.
811-22.
8. Hou Dejian eventually published an extensive account of the
final hours in the square that was published in a number of
overseas Chinese newspapers. Extracts also appeared in People's
Daily, since Hou's account tended to give credence to the
government's narrow contention that there had been no killing in
Tiananmen Square itself. The complete text of Hou's account,
entitled "Blame Me If You Want!", is included in Yi Mu and Mark V.
Thompson, Crisis at Tiananmen: Reform and Reality in Modern
China (San Francisco: China Books, 1989) pp. 239-49.

Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in
China's Democracy Movement, by George Black and Robin Munro
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993), pp. 234 - 246.
Excerpted by permission of publisher, John Wiley &Sons, Inc. To
order a copy of this book, please call 1-800-225-5945, or visit
your local bookstore.